[romantomjak]

I’m sceptical that migrating to GraphQL is actually an improvement. Instead of one team maintaining a cohesive API, you now have unlimited teams making shit up as they go?

The article also desperately needs more context. I don’t doubt a lot of cool engineering went into making this work, but for an outsider reading the article (and without them stating any goals apart from velocity) it’s unclear whether the whole thing was just an expensive resume driven development or an actual necessity that justified the invested engineering time

[jrockway]

I have not really figured out whether it's worse to turn programmers into API designers, or to force programmers to talk to each other and agree on a schedule for a feature that only benefits one half of the people talking to each other. Both are tricky.

To me, I think backend teams largely want to be left alone, while frontend teams want to make Their Thing today. So the backend teams say "sure we'll make an API" and then the frontend teams in theory never schedule PM-driven meetings with them, but can still experiment with new interaction patterns cheaply.

How this all works out in practice, I'm unsure, but highly suspicious. My personal opinion is that frontend and backend developers working on the same codebase, going to the same meetings, reviewing each other's code is probably faster and more efficient in the long run. But at some point you need 100 teams, and the "just have one team" method can't scale, so at that point, you have to accept that you can't be perfect and come up with something. GraphQL is that something.

(I would have just used SQL. Many good libraries around for parsing them into query plans that are easy to execute.)

[satvikpendem]

I posted this in another comment but if you know ThePrimeagen on Twitter/YouTube, he worked on Falcor (the precursor to this GraphQL change) and he talks more about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yab6i9lrEv0. TLDR, monolith made it hard for them to continue adding features.

[bnchrch]

I personally love GraphQL but my god is that man annoying

[hot_gril]

The first 0.2 seconds of that video made me doubt ever using GraphQL again.

[OJFord]

Why do people do this, I think surely they don't behave this way in real life, but they feel the need to for YouTube?

Another example that comes to mind, one I actually bared to watch some of, is Stephen Hawes (née Stephen the Robot). Great content, obviously a smart guy doing some great stuff. But every video starts over-excited 'hello my goblins and ghouls' (what?), we get crash zooms in on his face and mouth, violent music and head jerks to mark scene transitions, etc.

Of course by all means have some personality, it's your video, etc., I just don't believe this is their (offline) personality?

Matthias Wandel, Clough42, Marius Hornberger, and Phil's Lab I think each clearly have a certain personality that comes through, but it's 'professional', it's truly them, I assume, I think if I knew or met or worked with them in real life that they'd be exactly as I 'know' them to be. They seem genuine, and not insane.

[satvikpendem]

Use SponsorBlock to skip all of that filler, it skips more than just sponsors if you set it to do so in the settings.

[hot_gril]

Idk, last time I watched YouTube a lot was about a decade ago. It doesn't seem fun anymore.

[ysavir]

Does using Graphql inherently solve the monolith problem, or is adapting GraphQL just a biproduct of looking for a federated system?

[satvikpendem]

Seems to be the latter. I imagine they could have used gRPC as well but I definitely like the one-schema nature of GraphQL.